Jailhouse Rock: Wayne Kramer and the Jail Guitar Doors Initiative

“I watched as more people just like me went to prison in America, for longer sentences, in worsening conditions. There was terrible overcrowding and inhumane treatment. Finally I thought, ‘I gotta do something about this’.

In 1975 Wayne Kramer, of proto-punk heroes MC5, was imprisoned in Lexington, Kentucky for selling cocaine. His crime, like the majority of those prosecuted in the US, was non-violent. The experience changed him as a person and resulted in him taking on management of Billy Bragg’s Jail Guitar Doors initiative (named after The Clash song written about Kramer) in 2009. The project brings guitars to prisoners and runs songwriting workshops. Next month he will present a selection of guitars and perform in Mountjoy Prison.
 “After my own experience I was so disillusioned with the justice system,” he explains. “I looked to our national leaders, the politicians and everybody was looking the other way. I had met Billy in ‘79 and we had kept in touch, he told me what he’d been doing in the UK with Jail Guitar Doors and it became clear to me that this was the vehicle I had been looking for. He tasked me with bringing the programme to America. Today our guitars are in over 60 American prisons and we have a waiting list of over 50 more.”
At the time of his incarceration, Kramer was on an acutely self-destructive path.
“Prison was my salvation really,” he nods. “It was life-changing for me because I met another prisoner who was a great jazz trumpter, Red Rodney. He had replaced Miles Davis in the Charlie Parker quintet and was a formidable artist. He became my mentor. The time we spent playing music together...it’s like we weren’t in prison. And it’s the same thing that happens today with Jail Guitar Doors. People aren’t in prison when they’re playing music... it’s a mental release.”
“But I don’t think the prison experience helps anyone improve,” he counters. “I went in a bright-eyed bushy-tailed young fellow and came out more cynical and less trusting. I understand that as people in a civil society we have to have the rule of law. And I believe in the rule of law. But what we do in America is not justice.
“People can and should be held accountable for anti-social behaviour. I don’t think we’ve explored what the possibilities might be. Once you isolate people in these facilities hundreds of miles away from their family and friends, you’re creating more problems than you’re solving.
As Kramer points out, the penal system in the US had been in radical decline since his own experience, and the increasing privatisation in the sector has exacerbated the problem.
“The private prisons are worse. It’s an indecent and inhumane business when corporations profit from human misery,” he states.
“It’s also the biggest obstacle to reform. Frederick Douglass said ‘power concedes nothing without a demand’. That’s what we’re really up against. The challenge is going to be undoing the profit motive. Many people want change and an end to this drug war, which is the greatest failure in social policy in America’s domestic history.”
“I’d liked to see drugs legalised and controlled the way they were before the drugs war, through doctors and clinics,” he continues. “There are examples around the world. In Portugal they have completely decriminalised all possession of all drugs. They’ve eliminated drug abuse as a social problem by making clinics available for addicts. Harm reduction is the only thing that does work.”
Wayne Kramer takes part in a public interview and performance at Drogheda Arts Festival on May 2 with Paddy Goodwin and Eamon Carr.